Commercial customers send thousands of payment requests, valued at several billion dollars, to financial institutions every day for settlement, through payment origination systems. A financial institution such as a bank has many such payment origination systems to support a wide variety of business needs and customer channels such as the internet to service its customers. These systems in turn communicate with various payment systems such as wire transfer and Automated Clearing House (ACH) to settle and complete the payment request. Settlement is the process of debiting the account of the sender and in turn crediting the account of the receiver with the specified currency value. An account of a receiver may be with the any financial institution around the globe. The international and domestic businesses add more to the count of origination and payment systems.
Typically, payment origination systems are wired directly to every payment system and, hence, the maintenance and management of these systems is very expensive and difficult. The electronic payments business is also rapidly evolving, due to both technology developments and regulatory changes. As a result of this fluidity, multiple payment processing systems have, over time, become monolithic and redundant, with numerous connections directly between them. Consequently, a financial institution becomes saddled with an expensive payments platform, which is both time consuming to change and impossible to evolve to meet market demands.